rehype VS esbuild

Add Remark and Rehype plugins

Astro content collection are as simple as a folder containing a bunch of Markdown (or Markdoc or MDX) files if that's the only thing you need, but they can also do relationship matching between different collections, frontmatter validation using zod and you can also customize how the markdown is parsed and translated to html using rehype and remark and their plugin ecosystem.

That's all to render the post as HTML, there are lots of things you can do to customize the results, you can check the remark plugins and rehype plugins to pass as props to and you can also take a look at some other bloggers if you're looking for different styles for example Lee Robinson's or if you liked mine.

Now we have our Cloudinary account set up, we can use it with Docusaurus. To do so, we need to create a rehype plugin. This is a plugin for the rehype HTML processor. It's a plugin that will transform the HTML image syntax into a Cloudinary URL.

The next idea was to use normal markdown images and to place the images in the public folder. This eliminates the need for static import and treats our image like a remote image. But in order to make this work, we have to tell next/image the dimensions of the image. If we would use a static import for the image, the import magic would provide the dimensions for us. To pass the width and height to the image component we use a rehype plugin called rehype-img-size.

Astro makes it easy to add Remark or Rehype plugins to your markdown. You can extend add a markdown property to the Astro config file, an add a function/plugin to the remarkPlugins property (the extendDefaultPlugins property is added to make sure the default plugins aren't overwritten by this config change):

rehype: "rehype is a tool that transforms HTML with plugins. These plugins can inspect and change the HTML. You can use rehype on the server, the client, CLIs, deno, etc."

This means that you can transform your HTML with tools like rehype or remark. You can find out more about the available options here.

The HTML syntax tree is transformed through rehype, and rendered to React components.

During my search for deploying Lambdas via GitHub actions, I came across a tutorial that utilized ncc for converting TypeScript and bundling. While ncc is effective, I discovered esbuild, which proved to be significantly faster and perfectly suited to my requirements.

The advent of esbuild, the native support for ES Modules in browsers, the widespread adoption of import map, the emergence of tools like Native Federation, and the Nx ecosystem all combine to forge a flexible and well-maintained Micro Frontend Architecture.

EsBuild is a relatively new, blazing-fast JavaScript bundler and minifier. It stands out for its high performance, significantly speeding up the build process in development pipelines.

Unlike Webpack, the Vite DevServer only compiles files when they are requested. It leverages ES module imports, which allow JS files to import other files without needing to bundle them together during development. When one file changes, only that file needs to be re-compiled, and the rest can remain unchanged. Project files are compiled with Rollup.js. Third-party dependencies in node_modules are pre-compiled using the ultra-fast esbuild bundler for maximum speed, and they are cached until the dependency version changes. Vite also provides a client script for hot module reloading.

Use esbuild to build the React code into a form executable on both the server and client sides.

The functions will bundle using esbuild. For that, it is required to install esbuild globally:

TSX is the newest and most improved version of our ts-node, using ESBuild to transpile TS files to JS very quickly. The most interesting part is that TSX was developed to be a complete replacement for Node, so you can actually use TSX as a TypeScript REPL, if you install it globally with npm i -g tsx, just run tsx in your terminal and you can write TSX natively. But what's even cooler is that you can load TSX for all TypeScript files using --loader tsx when you run your file. For example, let's say we have this file called index.ts:

esbuild plus Vite is out of developer preview and enabled by default, yielding 67%, 87%, 80% speed improvements for build time, hybrid build time and hybrid serve time respectively.

Bundling with esbuild

Besides Webpack, there are many other popular web bundlers available, such as Parcel, Esbuild, Rollup, and more. They all have their own unique features and strengths, and you should make your decision based on the needs and requirements of your specific project. Please refer to their official websites for details.